Tuesday, 20 June 2017

Music News | New Foo Fighters Album | 'Concrete and Gold'

image via RCA Records

What the actual hell you guys?!

Well this came
out of left field. I knew the boys had something up their sleeves with the
release of ‘Run’ earlier this month, but certainly not the announcement of a new
album in 3 months. 3 months! Not
only that, but a US tour (hopefully a UK tour will follow)
and an epic Foo family barbecue blow-out named ‘Cal Jam 17’ are on the horizon; think of Cal Jam 17 as a
mini-Glastonbury in the faraway lands of California. In the press release attached
to the new record (God, we haven’t even got to that yet), it is stated that:

“Months, sounds
and stories (more on those soon, promise) and so many guitars later, the
11-Grammy-winning, 25+ million-record-selling, last great American stadium rock
band had completed its most ambitious album ever – which naturally begat
another insane challenge: How to celebrate music & throw the ultimate ‘backyard
party for 50,000 people’ …

“What came to
Grohl in that vision will soon become reality October 7 when Foo Fighters’ CAL JAM 17 takes over
Glen Helen Regional Park in San Bernardino, CA. In addition to being Foo
Fighters’ biggest ever one-day U.S. headline, in the spirit of the original
California Jam, this daylong marathon of eating, drinking and rocking features
an absolutely unfuckwithable lineup [kill me]: Queens of the Stone Age, Cage
the Elephant, Liam Gallagher, The Kills, Royal Blood, Japandriods, Wolf Alice,
Bob Mould, The Struts, Bully, Circa Waves, Babes in Toyland, Adia Victoria,
Fireball Ministry, The Obsessed, Pinky Pinky, Starcrawler, White Reaper … And
in addition to 12 hours of rock and roll and good times, Cal Jam 17 offers
camping, carnival rides, a water park, attractions, a mobile recording studio &
so much more.”

Back to the
record itself (I know, I still can’t believe this either), Concrete and Gold will be released September 15 worldwide via
Roswell Records / RCA Records this year. If you’re in America and pre-order the record
now, you can also get yourself on the list for pre-sale tickets for the upcoming tour this fall. This is a similar process to Queens of the Stone Age’s
announcement of Villains last week,
alongside their world tour.

Described as ‘hard
rock extremes and pop sensibilities collide on ninth opus’ in RCA’s press
release, Concrete and Gold is set to
be one of the loudest – and most intriguing – Foo Fighters records to date. With
the recent conformation of long-time touring keyboardist Rami Jaffee becoming
an official sixth member of the band (it’s about time!), the record was exciting
enough. That was before I discovered the choice of producer. RCA describe Dave’s
infatuation with a certain band, which would eventually lead to the ‘unlikely
alliance’ of the band and producer Greg Kurstin:

“Concrete and
Gold marries some of the most insanely heavy FF riffs ever with lush harmonic
complexities courtesy of a first-time team-up with producer Greg Kurstin
(Adele, Sia, Pink).

“This unlikely
alliance came about through a bizarre sequence of surprise musical obsessions
and chance encounters: Listening to the radio during a drive roughly four years
ago, Grohl first heard ‘Again and Again’ by Kurstin’s band The Bird & The
Bee – ‘It blew my mind … it was so much more sophisticated than anything I’d
ever heard and I became obsessed.’”

You can already
hear the amalgamation of Foo Fighters’ raw energy and Kurstins’ melodic, more
pop orientated sounds in the first single ‘Run’. This combination is blatantly
Foo Fighters’, but there is something different festering beneath the layers
upon layers of distortion. As Grohl states in the PR, “... I think maybe Greg is
the guy that we ask to be our producer because he’s never made a heavy rock
record before and we’ve never worked with a pop producer,” describing the
collaboration as “Motorhead’s version of Sgt.
Pepper.”

Not only did we
get the announcement and information surrounding Concrete and Gold, but we also got the tracklist (‘Run’, ‘La Dee Da’
and ‘The Sky Is A Neighborhood’ have already been heard):

(1) T-Shirt

(2) Run

(3) Make It
Right

(4) The Sky Is
A Neighbourhood

(5) La Dee Da

(6) Dirty Water

(7) Arrows

(8) Happy Ever
After (Zero Hour)

(9) Sunday Rain

(10) The Line

(11) Concrete
and Gold

Produced by
Kurstin and Foo Fighters, written and performed by the Foos and mixed by Darrell
Throp, Concrete and Gold is going to
be one of the biggest records of this year; when isn’t a Foo Fighters record
one of the biggest releases of the year … at least for me, anyway.

All information regarding the record can be found on Foo Fighters website and their artist page on RCA.